Bestselling writer and illustrator Susan Branch tested the self-publishing waters three years ago, when she published the first volume of her autobiography, A Fine Romance (2013) by working with Vineyard Stories, a local hybrid press near her home on Martha's Vineyard. Emboldened by the experience and wanting more control of the publishing process, she decided to go it alone and launched Spring Street Publishing the following year. Since then she's reissued a 10th anniversary of her lifestyle book Autumn (2014) and a second autobiography, The Fairy Tale Girl (2015). And published the third and final volume of the trilogy about her life, Martha's Vineyard, Isle of Dreams, earlier this month.
Links of the week May 9 2016 (19)
Our new feature links to interesting blogs or articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on in the book world:
16 May 2016
So far Branch, who began her career by publishing a series lifestyle books -- each installment lettered and painted by hand -- with Little, Brown, has no regrets about switching to self-publishing. Nor has she had difficulty reaching her audience without the backing of a large press. "Word-of-mouth is the secret," Branch said. She acknowledged that Little, Brown gave her a platform for many years. But it's really "the Girlfriends" - her readers - who have served as her ambassadors, she says. Roughly 350,000 to 500,000 Girlfriends read her blog and 53,000 subscribe to her quarterly newsletter.
Publishers are never short of problems. But perhaps the biggest problem is one we rarely talk about, partly because it's a hidden problem, partly because grappling with it presents a fundamental challenge to the business model we all rely on.
The problem is this: there are far, far too many books. The market for books is chronically saturated, yet we must all go on regardless, writing, publishing, selling, stocking, distributing and marketing more, more and more books year in, year out. At some level most of us recognise this, but rarely do we dwell on the business, let alone the cultural, implications.
Why does it matter? Because it changes the value equation. This is something I have been thinking about in connection with my forthcoming book, Curation: The Power of Selection in a World of Excess (Piatkus, 2 June). Essentially in such saturated environments, I believe value shifts to secondary selection from primary production. This is difficult for publishers inasmuch as they are producers of books, but good if we see publishers as arbiters and selectors. The truth is they are always both, but thinking in terms of an overloaded market - a market where the marginal value of adding another book is decidedly limited - lets publishers, and all in the book world, have a clear sense of where their value lies. Curation may be the buzzword we love to hate, dismissed as faddish and ridiculous, but underneath that it's a more interesting and powerful idea than we give it credit for.
In the shrewdly competitive world of publishing and publicity, the story behind a novel is often as important as the story between its covers. Like superheroes, modern writers stalk through the media trailing their origin myths behind them: think of JK Rowling scribbling away in an Edinburgh café at the Harry Potter books, or EL James bashing out the Twilight fan fictions that became 50 Shades of Grey. We love these it-could-be-you stories; publishers know this and strategise accordingly. As in so many other areas, it's human interest that sinks the hook.
The latest of these stories belongs to Andrew Michael Hurley, whose novel The Loney has a strong claim to being the greatest British publishing success of the past few years. In January, The Loney - a spooky tale of extreme Catholicism and pagan practices, set near Morecambe Bay in the Seventies - won the Costa prize for the year's best first novel. On Monday this week, it scooped not only the award for best debut novel but also the overall prize, Book of the Year, at the British Book Industry Awards.
The Caine Prize for African Writing is a registered charity whose aim is to bring African writing to a wider audience using our annual literary award. In addition to administering the Prize, we work to connect readers with African writers through a series of public events, as well as helping emerging writers in Africa to enter the world of mainstream publishing through the annual Caine Prize writers' workshop which takes place in a different African country each year.
Our link is to the shortlist, which has just been announced, and you can read the stories written by the shortlisted writers.
On Monday evening, the inaugural winners of the new Man Booker International prize will be named, rewarding the best translated novel of the year, a high-profile acclamation with a generous prize pot split evenly between translator and original author. And as part of this welcome focus, the MBIP has commissioned research from Nielsen into how the increasing number of works of translated literature actually sell. The headline data is still only partial, but promising: in the past 15 years, while the overall fiction market has stagnated, translated fiction sales have apparently increased by 96%. And today’s translations actually sell on average better than non-translations. But should we really be surprised?
All too often we translators discuss "translated fiction" as though it appeals only to a discerning but limited readership. A niche interest. Yet what we're really talking about is every book from all of continental Europe and Latin America, from much of Africa and most of Asia. That's quite some niche.
In early 2011, the American group Vida published the first iteration of its now-annual Vida Count, finding a striking gender imbalance in literary press coverage. Far more books reviewed in the previous year were by men than women; most of the reviewers were men.
Vida focused, understandably, on the best known general literary journals. As the editor of a magazine devoted to science fiction and fantasy - genres that tend to be covered only infrequently by, say, the LRB, but which have their own active critical culture - I wanted to know what the situation looked like in my corner of the literary world. The result was the Strange Horizons SF Count, now in its sixth year.
Jo Henry reports on how 'older female millennials' are driving the boom areas in publishing
From YA to grip lit These are the young women who grew up with Harry Potter: they would have been aged between 6 and 15 when the first novel in JK Rowling's series came out. They were also instrumental in the extraordinary growth in sales of YA titles such as The Fault in Our Stars and the Hunger Games and Divergent series. Since 2011, YA has been a key publishing genre, with purchasing fuelled not just by the teenagers at whom the books are targeted, but by consumers aged 18-plus buying for themselves. This generation of women has become an important one for the book industry, seemingly making or breaking genres with their patronage - and in 2015, they found "grip lit" a suitable replacement for the YA books they had been devouring a few years before.
9 May 2016
The fact is, we don't know what the heck Amazon is now, even assuming we ever did. When it first appeared on the scene, it seemed clear that it was a new kind of bookstore. Think of Barnes & Noble, add the Internet, and you have Amazon, right? Well, not so fast. Even at the outset Amazon seemed to be playing a different game. I recall contemplating the Amazon affiliates program when the company first launched and not knowing just what to make of it. On one hand it seemed like the virtual equivalent of a chain bookstore, with many outlets being serviced by a small number of distribution centers; on the other hand, it seemed to be playing the game on a scale never before contemplated. The affiliates program had the potential to convert every Web site into a storefront for Amazon (you could never do anything remotely like this in bricks and mortar), and it also carried the implication that there would be one and only one bookstore on the Internet, a situation that is close to being the case today. So was Amazon a bookstore . . . or something else?
As Amazon grew it always seemed to fall into intelligible categories of business. From bookstores it branched into other kinds of ecommerce: music, video, electronics. It wasn%u2019t a bookstore any more, but still it made a kind of sense: Amazon was evolving into a broad-based retailer, like Circuit City (remember them?) or Best Buy. But just as one made sense of that, Amazon was a step ahead, providing back-office services for other retailers (Toy 'R' Us and even Borders Books). Now, there is a way to make sense of that: Amazon was simply taking advantage of infrastructure it had already invested in. If it had learned how to provide secure credit card transactions online (a truly amazing bit of technology), it would simply make that capability available to others %u2014 for a fee, or course. At the same time it made it unnecessary for even its rivals, which were working in part on the Amazon platform, to make those investments themselves. Now what is the implication of that?
Yesterday Entertainment Weekly ran a piece about debut novels with six-figure advances and why publishers are willing to take big financial risks on (relative) literary unknowns. The answer is, among other things, "because they believe they will make even more money later," but the part that really leapt out at me was this:
You can't count on selling a book on the writer's talent alone-so while factors like being photogenic or savvy with social media won't make or break a deal, they can definitely sweeten it. "I actually knew very little about [Sweeney] when I bought The Nest," says her editor at Ecco, Megan Lynch. "I didn't know that, for example, she knew Amy Poehler well enough to approach her for a blurb. That was a happy bonus." Lynch stresses that while she would never "decline a book I loved because I felt like the author wouldn't be able to handle an NPR interview, it would certainly affect how determined I might be: Am I going to hang in for another round at auction, or drop out?" Herr, for her part, acknowledges that an author's appearance can affect an advance - "We look at all of that stuff" - but insists, "We would have paid her the same money if she weighed 500 pounds and was really hard to look at. That's my firm belief [emphasis added]."
"We would have paid her the same money if she weighed 500 pounds and was really hard to look at."
What that quote promises is, at best, that editors and other publishing gatekeepers will do their best not to hold a writer's appearance against them, and promises it weakly at that. "We would have paid her the same money if she weighed 500 pounds and was really hard to look at" translates roughly to: "We would not try to offer a fat writer less money for being fat," which seems an awfully low bar. The effect is a little too self-congratulatory by half. While it's not a direct comparison, I imagine reading a prospective employer proudly promising not to pay fat employees less money than their thin counterparts: "We promise not to violate the law when compensating people for their work". It assumes, too, that the reader believes it's normal or somehow instinctive to want to offer less money to a fat writer (or anyone "hard to look at"). A lot of writers who know that editors and agents think of their bodies as "hard to look at" knew what that sentence means for them and what they can expect in trying to get published.
After reading just two pages of Emma Cline's luminous novel The Girls - about the young women flocking around a Manson-like cult figure - Random House editor Kate Medina shut her door. "I said, ‘I'm not doing anything else. I'm not talking to anybody. I'm just reading this book,'" she recalls. And when she finished, Medina offered Cline a three-book, reported $2 million deal. (The book hits stores in June.)
Cline isn't the only debut author who reportedly scored a whopper of an advance. Others include Stephanie Danler, whose coming-of-age novel Sweetbitter goes on sale in May; Cynthia d'Aprix Sweeney, whose just-published dysfunctional-family romp The Nest is at No. 2 on the New York Times list; and Imbolo Mbue, whose novel Behold the Dreamers - the story of an immigrant couple working for a Lehman Brothers exec in 2008 - is due in August.
With the ease of cranking words into a computer, it's easy to get lulled into the idea that anyone can be a writer. Yet the specific words you write are important. Which words are you selecting when you write and are you using the right combination?
Whether you are writing a children's book or a novel or nonfiction or a personal experience magazine article, your word choice is critical. How do you learn this skill? You will use it in many aspects of the work - from the title for your book or the headline for your article. Or the words on the back cover of your book which helps a reader know if they should purchase your book or press on to the next one. In the writing business, creating words which sell is called copy and the specific skill is called copywriting. The good news is you can learn this skill as a writer.
I've read thousands of books in my lifetime, so you'd think I'd be fantastic at trivia, know the Jeopardy questions, always win arguments, and bore the patience out of my friends. I'm terrible with trivia, mediocre at Jeopardy, vague in arguments, and spend most of my conversational time listening. For some reason, all that book knowledge just doesn't stick with me.
So why read what we can't remember?
Wouldn't it be great if we actually remembered exactly what we read? Which brings up the book I'm currently reading, Jesus Before the Gospels by Bart D. Ehrman. Don't be misled by the title, because the book is about memory and not religion. There were 40-65 years between when Jesus died and when the four Gospels were written. This book is about how historic events might have been remembered and passed down orally. Ehrman explores the limits of memory in a preliterate culture. I'd be in big trouble if I had to write the Gospel According to Jane Mayer fifty years from now.
Readings first opened in 1969, and it was a partnership of three - Ross Reading, his wife Dorothy Reading, and Peter Reid. At the time, Australia had a very small local publishing industry and most books came from overseas, as Australia was regarded as part of the British Commonwealth via UK publishers.
The Readings owners saw an opportunity to bypass the UK gatekeepers and import these new books directly from wholesalers. In 1976, Ross Reading retired and sold the business to Mark Rubbo, Greg Young and Steve Smith, who owned several record stores in Melbourne. Rubbo, Young and Smith continued running the Carlton shop, and rebadged their record shops as Readings stores as well, adding books to the mix. Business boomed through the 80s and 90s, and Rubbo became managing director of Readings, eventually receiving a Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for service to the community through fostering an awareness of Australian literature as a bookseller.
Readings now has five stores around Melbourne, plus a growing e-commerce business, and will be opening a sixth store later this year. It produces the Readings Monthly, a print newsletter featuring staff reviews, features and interviews, which has over 15,000 subscribers. Readings is involved with more than 300 events per year, with over 200 of those held in its shops. It runs a charitable arm, administers two awards for early-career Australian writers, has a very active online presence, and, of course, it sells lots and lots of books.
Bridget Shine reports on how the Independent Publishers Guild is using the results of its biggest ever survey of members
We have always known that UK independent publishing is flourishing, energetic and innovative, but collecting the evidence to prove it has always been a challenge. That is why, with the help of Nielsen, the Independent Publishers Guild (IPG) set out to conduct the biggest ever survey of our members last year, distilling the results into our inaugural Independent Publishing Report. It is an invaluable measure of the value of the sector, an important benchmarking tool for our members, and an authoritative tracker of publishing trends, challenges and opportunities. Here are its headline findings.
Independent publishers are driving innovation: both the report and our recent Annual Spring Conference have showcased the huge innovation and ambition in independent publishing at the moment, and proved that this sector has the flexibility and creativity to transform itself.